


The Best Thing About Saint Denis

by owlpockets



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Caretaking, Drinking, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Lesbian awakening, Past Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Shopping, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28434639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlpockets/pseuds/owlpockets
Summary: “The best thing about Saint Denis,” Karen had said, “is the shops.”  Sadie didn’t believe a single word of it.
Relationships: Sadie Adler/Karen Jones
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7
Collections: fandomtrees





	The Best Thing About Saint Denis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThrillingDetectiveTales](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/gifts).



> Original prompt: Sadie is still reeling from losing her husband when Karen takes her under her wing and teaches her some pleasures she may never have encountered before. Karen is kind of a mess, but her heart is good and though Sadie didn't think she would ever fall in love again, she finds herself there.
> 
> Some Sadie introspection and lesbian awakening. I wouldn’t exactly say we made it to the falling in love part of the prompt because it veered a little darker than I originally planned, but they’re on their way! **Content warnings for grief/mourning, unhealthy coping mechanisms, one very brief mention of suicidal ideation, and a semi-graphic depiction of a dead horse (I am so sorry).**

“The best thing about Saint Denis,” Karen had said, “is the shops.” She waxed poetic about the multitude of options for a lady to enjoy, from clothes to hats to breads to candies to perfumes. There was a whole street, Karen claimed, dedicated to the most delightful shops, all the way from the start to the end. A lady could take a carriage there and alight onto cobbles without even toeing the sticky Lemoyne mud.

Sadie didn’t believe a single word of it. The Saint Denis she was familiar with was built from the mingled muck of mud and horse shit and police, and it smelled like despondency and yellow fever in the summer heat. Leaning against the wall of the market, she smoked a cigarette with Arthur while they watched a handful of folks struggle to drag a bloated dead horse out of the middle of the road where a large wagon was waiting to get by. Neither of them felt inclined to help.

“This is the worst place I have ever been,” Sadie remarked, trying to reconcile Karen’s fairytale version with what she was seeing now, on her first day trip to the city.

Arthur just grunted in agreement, too miserably hot to be in any sort of mood for small talk. The locals managed to move the carcass a little bit, and an almighty stench reached her nostrils along with the cloud of flies that swirled into the air. “Christ!” Sadie exclaimed, dropping her cigarette as she grabbed for her bandana to muffle the smell. She was certainly no stranger to dealing with dead horses, but this was a fresh sort of hell. Karen Jones was full of shit.  
__

Karen rode into camp one day smelling like a bouquet of roses and sporting a fresh hairdo. There was a spring in her step and brightness to her eyes that Sadie hadn’t seen in weeks. Sadie was slowly melting out of a chair on the porch as Karen passed by, and she stared in quiet disbelief. “You been in town?”

Karen stopped and touched her hair, bouncing the gleaming yellow curls with her fingers. “I have. Do you like it?”

“Uhh,” Sadie started, surprised Karen was even asking her. It wasn’t like Sadie had strong opinions on fashion. “It looks real pretty, Miss Karen.”

There was a wicked glint in Karen’s eyes, one that made Sadie’s nerves thrill with something unidentifiable. “I was visiting with a lady above the perfume shop and she did it for me. I bet yours would look real pretty too with some curls.” The way she said visiting was strange, like she meant something different.

“Well, I don’t know. Doesn’t seem practical right now,” Sadie replied uncertainly. Self-consciously, she touched her braid, wondering if there was mud (or worse) tangled in ends. She hadn’t looked at a mirror in a while, knowing, and not especially caring, that she probably looked a fright.

Karen laughed. “Oh, come on! You spend too much time with the men. Come to town with me next time, we’ll have some fun.”

“Well…I guess…” Sadie agreed after a moment’s hesitation. At the very least, a bath and a nice meal would be welcome. Karen’s gave her a genuinely open smile in return, and Sadie couldn’t help but smile a little in return.  
__

Sadie was drunk, and the unpleasant sort of drunk that made head swirl sickeningly with thoughts she didn’t want to confront. Karen was also drunk, but she was obliviously singing a song that had a lascivious twist at the end of every verse to herself. Tilly and Mary-Beth were already passed out. Abigail wasn’t even tipsy, holding a sleeping Jack in her lap while she watched the fire get low. Molly had not deigned to grace them with her presence. Sadie wanted to sleep, but closing her eyes with her head pillowed against a log wasn’t doing much to help with that.

Sunset that day had finally delivered a slight break in the heat, and the evening had been so balmy Karen had gathered all the women, Sadie included, to play cards and drink. The cards had gone well, the drinking had not. In high spirits, the whiskey had been passed too fast and too often, leading Sadie to a melancholy that she felt far too often when drinking anymore. Watching Abigail with her child was making it a hundred times worse. Sadie wasn’t that person that wanted a family anymore, and she realized painfully that maybe she never had been. She loved Jake with every bit of her soul, but what few times they tried to have children left them both cold and frustrated. It weighed on her more and more after his death, because he would have made such a kind, loving father, because she felt he had _deserved_ to have that opportunity to share his wonderful heart.

Not for the first time, and probably not for the last time either, Sadie’s felt her despair loom up in the dark as a separate entity, threatening to lash out at the people around her that most certainly did not deserve that. She needed to get away from them, needed solitude to work out this new wave of grief physically before it consumed her. She managed to sit up, but it took so much effort she merely sat there rather than trying to make the effort to stand.

Then Sadie was being hauled up by her armpits and the sudden change in elevation made her head swim. She shoved an elbow back at whoever it was, but it didn’t hit very hard in her state and position. “Gerroff,” she slurred, struggling.

“Just let me get you to bed,” another drunk voice said in her ear. It was Karen’s voice; Sadie had no understanding before that moment of just how physically strong she was. She couldn’t, _wouldn’t_ , let herself be distracted by the feeling of being held. 

“I can go jus’ fine,” Sadie growled.

“’S no shame in getting a little help when you’re drunk an’ sad,” Karen hiccuped, and Sadie felt her warm breasts press up against her back. Her brain, intoxicated and confused, admitted to liking that feeling more than she wanted to.

“I said ‘m fine.” Sadie freed herself, and immediately regretted it when she tripped on a chair and pitched forward, narrowly avoiding landing with her hand in the fire. The mud cushioned her head where she smacked it against the ground. It matted in her hair and smeared over the shoulder of her blouse.

Karen sighed theatrically, arms locking around Sadie’s chest again where she lay dazed. “You ain’t fine, you’re mopin’,” she said, hauling her upright. “An’ drunk. Okay, I’m drunk too, but you’re _real_ drunk.”

There was plenty of truth in that, and Sadie didn’t fight her this time. Karen got her upright and ducked under her arm, half walking, half dragging her away from the fire and toward her tent. Sadie staggered along, tripping over her own boots a couple of times before crashing onto her bedroll and taking Karen down with her. Karen had tried to let her down easy, but they were too hopelessly drunk for a graceful landing.

Sadie gave a short, humorless laugh, her mind swimming with an image of the same mishap with Jake early in their marriage. What a hard year that had been; they hadn’t been coping well, but at least they had been alive and together. So alive. Sadie had thought she was grateful that she hadn’t died with him, but perhaps she had been lying to everyone, herself included.

Before Karen could fully disentangle herself, Sadie suddenly was gasping at the wreck of her life, clutching at Karen with the desperation of a drowning woman. An wild noise escaped her throat, half scream and half sob. 

Alarmed, Karen pinned Sadie’s arms down to the bedroll before she could hurt one of them. “Whoa there, I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

Sadie stopped struggling, letting herself be soothed by Karen’s weight pushing her down, making her be still. Through the haze of alcohol and disconnected memories, she could see the lines of worry on Karen’s pretty face, her hair glowing like a halo around her in the dim firelight. “I miss my husband,” Sadie admitted, with an embarrassing crack in her voice. She realized she was crying. Drunk and filthy and crying against someone’s chest, a place she’d never allowed herself to be before.

“I know, darlin’, I know,” Karen shushed her, petting her hair despite the awful mess.

In the morning, Karen was still still sleeping soundly when Sadie got up to vomit into the bushes. When she was done, still a little drunk, she staggered back to the campfire where John wordlessly handed her a cup of coffee he’d been about to drink, both eyebrows raised questioningly and Jack drowsing against his shoulder.

Sadie took it and looked down at herself, shame filling her chest at the state she was in, at how she must have behaved. Most of it was hazy, but not hazy enough to stop herself from remembering falling on her face and sobbing into Karen’s tits. Heat crept uncomfortably up her neck. “Don’t you start,” she growled.

“Wasn’t gonna,” John hesitated for a second, “but you got a lizard in your hair.”

The little brown anole leapt out onto ground, tail thrashing, and Jack giggled. Sadie stared at it, considered being sick again, and took a sip of the coffee instead to settle her nerves and her stomach at the same time. “Guess it’s time for a bath,” she admitted.

Sadie recovered from her drunken embarrassment as well as she could that day without only a bucket to wash in. Karen wouldn’t take no for an answer on helping her rinse out her hair, attacking it with a bar of soap in a way that Sadie couldn’t manage on her own. She sat on a stool facing out over the water at Karen’s insistence, exposed to the elements since her dirty shirt was now in Mary-Beth’s care and she hadn’t wanted to make a mess of her good one. The feel of Karen’s fingers on her scalp and Karen’s gaze on her bare skin made her face feel uncomfortably hot, yet not out of shame. Sadie liked the way the other woman firmly massaged her head, working out some of the tension that had been building up for weeks. Not a soul bothered them, though she could hear the rest of the camp going about their business on the other side of the small stand of trees. 

After her bath, Sadie ate and slept the rest of the day away, finally waking in the evening to take over guard duty. Karen shared a small smile with her as she passed over the rifle. Sadie mumbled a “thank you” when she couldn’t find better words to show her appreciation.

“Ain’t nothing.” Karen waved her off. “We’re going to Saint Denis tomorrow, you and me.”

__

Karen lead her to a cafe annexed to a larger restaurant that claimed to only serve ladies, and, indeed, that’s what it was. Standing on the tidy green and white tiling that proclaimed “Ladies’ Entrance,” Sadie could see other women around their age scattered at small tables in twos and threes, talking, laughing, smoking. One or two were wearing trousers, and Sadie felt a little less out of place walking in.

They were greeted warmly by the host and seated with coffee and little sandwiches that Karen requested. Sadie didn’t know the first thing about eating at restaurants, but Karen fit naturally into the flow of smoking and talking amiably with the folks around them. Part of that came from Karen’s ability as a con artist, Sadie assumed, but also the peculiarly feminine environment framed her beautifully with her girlish curls and fashionable little hat. A woman to their left cast what Sadie could only call admiring eyes over Karen’s profile, and that look left her with something new to think about, something like pride that she was the one sitting across from the most gorgeous woman in the room.

Around camp, it was no great secret that Karen had always been free with her choice of companionship, though Sadie had been largely immune to the fireside gossip of her exploits, caught up in her grief and rage. Yet, Karen intrigued her in a way Sadie hadn’t tried to understand before. Perhaps she did want to examine that part of herself now.

After the cafe, Karen led Sadie to a handful of shops along the same street. They sampled chocolates, sniffed perfumes, and goggled at jewelry. Karen’s boisterous charm had the jeweler wrapped around her finger to the point where he didn’t notice her slip a gold necklace into her skirt. Sadie unsuccessfully tried to stifle the smirk on her lips on the way out the door, joining in Karen’s degenerate giggles as they turned out onto the street arm in arm.

Karen declared one more stop before they would head back to camp for the evening. There was a small women’s clothing store at the end of the street, tastefully boasting the latest fashions in undergarments. Sadie balked at the lurid jewel tones of the dresses in the window, but simultaneously she came to a quiet understanding in herself that she wouldn’t mind seeing Karen in those pretty underthings.


End file.
